Free Republic

On Friday’s broadcast of CNN International’s “Quest Means Business,” Jason Furman, who served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama and on the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Economic Council under President Bill Clinton and is currently a Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard University and the Harvard Kennedy School, stated that while some action was needed, President Joe Biden’s economic stimulus plan was too big, badly designed, ultimately “brought us a lot more inflation than it did in terms of economic growth.” And “got the balance wrong.”

On Tuesday’s “CNN Tonight,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg responded to a question on whether the spending in the American Rescue Plan is partially to blame for inflation by stating that “we have a lot of the issues that are associated with those very low unemployment rates” as a result of the American Rescue Plan. Host Don Lemon asked, “President Biden is blaming the pandemic and Putin’s war for inflation. But what about that $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan? The San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank concluded last year, Secretary, that the stimulus contributed to inflation. Shouldn’t at least part of the...

Now that Emmanuel Macron has been ensconced in the Elysees Palace for another five years, Europe is moving to ‘punish’ Moscow (and its own people) by trying to wean the Continent off of Russian natural gas and oil (something that’s easier said than done). But in defiance of the threatened cash crunch, the Russian government is taking some cues from West: to wit, the Kremlin has assembled an economic relief package worth tens of billions of dollars to help shield the country’s people, and its businesses, from the impact of sanctions. According to WSJ, since the start of the invasion,...

What happens when the massive Fed stimulus is gone? Its Already Gone … or going. A measure of U.S. manufacturing activity unexpectedly dropped in April to the lowest level since 2020 as growth in orders, production and employment softened. The Institute for Supply Management’s gauge of factory activity fell to 55.4 last month from 57.1, according to data released Monday. The Manufacturing Prices index remained elevated. As the 10-year Treasury yield tries to breech the 3% barrier.

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah tore into President Joe Biden's management of inflation on Wednesday, torching the administration's handling of the economy and inflation as Americans grapple with the worst price hikes in decades. "President Biden needs to ditch his woke advisers and surround himself with people who want to get the economy working again," Romney wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. He blamed the Biden administration for stoking inflation with a stimulus law that issued "stay-at-home" checks for Americans, and citing moves like oil and gas production limits and a pro-union stance. The White House declined to...

The Covid epidemic was bad enough with the government shutdowns and deaths. But was even worse is that all the Fed monetary stimulus and Federal government stimulus “relief” led to a reversal of fortune. In that, the share of net worth held by the top 1% grew and the gap between the 1% and bottom 50% hit an all-time high. Now that the 1% have fed at the Federal trough, The Fed is anticipated to raise rates by 100 basis points at the next two meetings. Remember, REAL average hourly earnings are getting crushed under Biden and his pro-1% policies....

On July 23, 2020, CNBC published an article by Elizabeth Schulze headlined: Here’s why economists don’t expect trillions of dollars in economic stimulus to create inflation.That one didn’t age well, did it? At the time CNBC published this article, the Federal Reserve had expanded its balance sheet from $4 trillion to roughly $7 trillion. (We’re now knocking on the door of $9 trillion.) That means when this article was published, the central bank had created about $3 trillion out of thin air and injected it into the economy. But as Schulze pointed out, the Fed was still projecting “inflation will...

As the federal government flooded the economy with nearly $5 trillion during the pandemic to avert recession, fraudsters have had a field day, filching tax credits, tax refunds, stimulus money and unemployment benefits in one of the biggest heists of federal and taxpayer funds in American history. “We’ve never seen fraud at this scale before. We knew there was going to be more fraud with stimulus because fraud follows the money, but I don’t think anyone expected the absolute enormity of it,” says Linda Miller, a principal at Grant Thornton who served as deputy executive director from 2020 to 2021...

CHICAGO — A former U.S. Postal Service employee based in Chicago has been indicted on federal charges for allegedly stealing stimulus checks from the mail. Olivia Bryant, 33, of Chicago, has been charged with three counts of theft from the U.S. mail. During her arraignment, Bryant pleaded not guilty.

This clip from the Bruce Willis and Meryl Streep film “Death Becomes Her” perfectly represents the predicament surrounding The Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policies and housing prices: “Now a warning” after Meryl Streep ingests The Fed’s magic monetary elixir. The Dallas Federal Reserve issued a warning recently that a housing bubble is brewing … after the economy drank its magic monetary elixir. We can see the housing bubble clearly (defined as the spread between REAL home price growth and REAL average hourly earnings). Notice that the current housing bubble looks similar to the infamous 2005 housing bubble. And the US...

It looks like the analytical geniuses over at the San Francisco Fed have finally figured out something that Larry Summers anticipated nearly a year ago: When you pump trillions of dollars of stimulus spending into the economy, it causes inflation to overheat to the highest level in a generation. Of course, Summers was aggressively poo-poo'd by policy nabobs at Treasury (not to mention the Eccles Building) when he first projected that inflation would likely exceed 5% by the end of 2021 thanks to the federal government's decision to hand out trillions of dollars in stimmies, benefits and PPP loans (combined...

Roughly a dozen states are proposing sending tax rebate checks to their residents to offset the highest inflation in four decades, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle pointing to high gas and food prices as prompting their actions. Among them is Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, who on Wednesday signed a law to send checks of up to $500 to state residents. The reason, he said in a statement, is to soften the impact of inflation on household budgets — and also return some of money amid a record state budget surplus.

Americans already faced searing inflation when gas prices surged to an all-time high earlier this month. Now, some lawmakers want the federal government to offer stimulus payments or rebate checks to help reduce the pain at the pump. Families with two children could get as much $300 per month as long as the nation's average gas price exceeds $4 a gallon, according to one new bill proposed by Reps. Mike Thompson of California, John Larson of Connecticut and Lauren Underwood of Illinois. All three lawmakers are Democrats

Illegal aliens in the sanctuary state of New Jersey could get another round of stimulus checks, paid for by the state’s taxpayers, in addition to the checks they received last year. Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) is proposing another $53 million in the state budget to fund one-time $500 stimulus checks for more than 100,000 illegal aliens. Nearly half a million illegal aliens currently live in New Jersey.

It has been 14 years since The Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke unleashed zero interest rate policies (ZIRP) and quantitative easing (QE) in late 2008. And Fed monetary stimulypto is still running strong after almost 14 year of monetary mismanagement and asset bubble stimulation. The Federal Reserve under Bernanke and Yellen raised their target rate exactly once under President Obama before the election of Donald Trump. After Trump was elected, The Fed raised their target rate 8 times, lowered it 5 times. There have been no rate hikes under Biden. There seemingly never-ending Fed monetary stimulus has resulted in the...

@RepThomasMassie I see a lot of people saying this is illegal (RE: AOC helping illegal immigrants get stimulus checks). If it were illegal, she wouldn’t be bragging about it. This is what I opposed, when no other Republican representative would stand up in 2020. Then I tried to show that these checks were going to non-citizens and people doubted me.

Taxpayers hoping to treat themselves this year with their tax refund money may have to wait till next year for their reward after the IRS revealed its processing backlog is more than twice as big as it previously reported. The Internal Revenue Service is still struggling to process close to 24 million tax return filings from last year, according to a report by the Washington Post. That's more than twice as much as the 11.4 million unprocessed business and individual returns that the tax agency reported in mid-December 2021. The bureaucratic snarl threatens to delay many tax refunds for 10...

The ABC, CBS and NBC evening networks ignored a damning story connecting “Boston Bomber” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to President Joe Biden’s disastrous stimulus bill. Boston 25 News reported Jan. 5 that Tsarnaev “received a $1,400 COVID relief payment” on June 22, 2021, according to a document filed by prosecutors. The date suggests that Tsarnaev received the payment just over three months after Biden signed his gargantuan $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus March 11, which included $1,400 checks. Newsweek noted in its write-up that “Prisoners were largely eligible to receive $1,400 payments included in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that President Joe...

The good news is that US Real GDP grew at 2.3% QoQ in Q3 thanks to massive Federal government and Federal Reserve stiimulus. The bad news? Prices are growing at rate of 6% QoQ, three times higher than the growth of real personal consumption. Runaway inflation, cooling personal consumption. This is the definition of “stimulyltpo”: the excessive spending by Washington DC in conjunction with excessive monetary stimulus from The Federal Reserve. Let’s see if Christmas season is jolly with Sewage Joe trying to scare everyone about Omicron.

Democrat lawmakers have warned another round of federal coronavirus stimulus aid may be necessary in the wake of the emergence of the omicron variant of the virus. Despite Biden’s 2020 promise he would shut down the virus before announcing in July the United States was closer to “declaring our independence from a deadly virus,” the appearance of the omicron variant has caused Democrats to wonder if additional coronavirus aid is necessary.